Tag: pedagogy

This year has passed by in a whirlwind of emails and events, planning sessions, meetings, and conferences, interviews, sudden trips, and all of those big and small life moments in between. Still, with summer right around the corner and the promise of lazy beach days to come, I want to press pause to reflect and take in what this year, what being a part of this program, has meant. I’ve already written my letters to CUNY and FSU but this one needs its own space in part to recognize the importance of the space you’ve given me.

The opportunity to join the Futures Initiative came just at the right moment when I was nearing the end of an exhilarating and exhausting year teaching at Fordham, wondering what my next step should be. The idea of taking a breather from the classroom to take on a leadership role in running and building a program was daunting and unfamiliar but also exciting, challenging, and, if I’m honest, a relief after a long year of too much teaching and grading and not enough time to think and do my own research. You caught me, in short, at a moment of awkward and uncertain transition and for that I need to say thank you, even though this year has felt like a long drawn-out series of thank you’s that can never possibly capture the complicated emotions and depths of my appreciation. But let me try anyway.

I could list the big public-facing events that you gave me space to organize, including that one in September on “Pedagogies of Dissent for Asian American Studies” that allowed me to bring my questions, work, and myself into the program. This and the other events we organized this year created room for ongoing conversations about the stakes of higher education, pedagogy, politics, aesthetics, and what we as scholars, teachers, and students could do to materialize a university worth fighting for. But while these were occasions to assemble the different publics and communities we serve, to clear space for precisely those vital, timely dialogues, I am perhaps most grateful for the internal, invisible things that this program accomplishes that do not fit neatly into event recaps.

So, let me say thanks by bringing to light some of this invisible stuff that too often escapes notice because it happens during quiet meetings, on frantic phone calls, endless email loops, and–perhaps unique to this program–on giant post-it notes and in ever-expanding collections of collaborative Google Docs. Thank you for teaching me about the tremendous amount of labor involved in running a vibrant, multi-faceted program that cuts across CUNY, New York City, and beyond. I had a small taste of this behind-the-scenes work this year; the relentless energy it takes to track down answers and resources, to wrestle with fickle budgets and deal with inevitable technical glitches, to lay the groundwork, devise back-up plans, and carve out spaces and opportunities for creativity, mentorship, community, and conversation that are so vital–in short, the work that Lauren, Celi, Cathy, and Katina model daily with grace, passion, and dedication. I have learned from all of you what it means to be a fierce administrator and leader, to embody a willingness to listen, learn, stand up, give time, fight for, and defend, all at once, a practice of inhabiting institutions that I take with me.

I’ve been holding my breath, holding myself back from writing this letter because I know that it can never encompass all I want to say about what being in and of you has meant. And/but I am taking the advice that a CUNY mentor once gave me when I was floundering during the dissertation process, to start writing before you areready,because I know this letter is one that I’ll never be fully ready to write.

In many ways, it was growing up in and with you that helped me find community, direction, purpose, a voice, myself. So, there is much I want and need to say:

The first is thank you. Thank you for giving me opportunities that I know I haven’t always appreciated. Thank you for the people you brought into my life–friends, teachers, mentors, allies, leaders, students, strangers–people who have been variously kind, strong, loving, hurtful, generous, difficult, inspirational. Thank you for the way you forced me to get to know this city, to move out of the sheltered corner of Little Neck, Queens where I grew up to traverse its sprawling landscape, to walk across bridges, to find other sites of belonging. You taught me how to feel at home in this city. Thank you for the skills you helped me develop while I was learning and working as a CUNY student and teacher: the ability to read, write, and grade papers standing on public buses and trains, a dexterity honed during long commutes and all-too-frequent MTA delays; a knack for finding windows in stuffy, claustrophobic buildings, to look for spaces to let light in when the weight of the work feels especially heavy; a know-how for tracking down resources, opportunities, and pockets of funding, which you haven’t always made easy to find, but it’s because of that that I learned to ask questions and to make demands, to realize the sound and worth of my own voice; an eye for recognizing people who are similarly lost and out of place, who are also driven by questions, ideas, and a refusal to accept things as they are; an intuition for making community out of commuter campuses, to find people and causes worth showing up and fighting for.This list could go on and on.

On Wednesday, March 28, 2018, the Futures Initiative hosted a daylong forum on “Publics, Politics, and Pedagogy: Remaking Higher Education for Turbulent Times.” Part of our University Worth Fighting For series, this event was an occasion to foster interdisciplinary conversation on the relationship between pedagogy, equity, and institutional change. It was also an opportunity for the people involved in the many areas of our program–from our graduate fellows and the students and faculty involved in F.I. team-taught courses to our undergraduate leadership fellows and colleagues in the Humanities Alliance–to share their knowledge and experiences in a public setting, to engage precisely the different publics our work serves. We were joined by faculty, staff, students, administrators, and activists both in person and online (via Twitter and livestream) from across CUNY, New York City, and beyond. During the event, we collectively contemplated the current state and stakes of higher education, the challenges of being both a teacher and student in today’s turbulent sociopolitical climate, and the possibilities that might arise from and through our pedagogy, creative work, political commitments, and public encounters, which the day’s activities and conversations only affirmed are not separate endeavors.

It was a pleasure for me to shape this event and then to watch it unfold, to listen and learn from old and new allies, and to revel in the ways that the Futures Initiative’s mission to advance innovation and equity in higher education resonated across the dialogues, workshops, presentations, and bodies assembled in the room.

One of the challenges of teaching is struggling to find time–the time you need to lesson plan and prepare for your classes, to cover material you’ve included on your course syllabi, to support students, create and grade assignments, and so on and on.

Teachers are pressed for time. This is hardly a new revelation. And yet, because the minutes we have in the classroom with our students are precious, I am writing here to argue for making time–for listening dyads (as the title of this post suggests), but also for what motivates them, a commitment to building an inclusive community in your classrooms that ensures everyone’s voices are heard.

In the Futures Initiative we discuss the importance of practices like this through the concept of structuring equality. It is an idea that recognizes the value hierarchies and conditions of social inequity that underwrite higher education and the broader material worlds in which we live. To enact meaningful transformation therefore requires more than good intentions; it entails actively building structures for equality and inclusion in our classrooms, the sites where we–as teachers–have the most immediate impact.

I have been a fan of your work since I read Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005) at the beginning of my graduate studies, so I don’t know why it has taken me this long to pick up The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). But since I started reading it in late August, I can’t stop thinking about your project.

It offers such a captivating invitation- to follow the lifeways of matsutake, wild mushrooms, and the lives it assembles. Who would’ve thought that a project could be built around a single type of mushroom? …But you did. I’m sure there were and still are people who would dismiss a work like this for daring to focus on something so small and, some would say, insignificant. And yet, you elegantly show us how following matsutake opens up whole worlds.

Your work has attuned me to new ways of seeing and understanding received categories and concepts–capitalism, ecology, labor, freedom, precarity, and ruin. I am still in awe of how deftly you take readers from the day-to-day struggles of mushroom foragers searching for matsutake in the forests of Oregon and the complicated stories of how and why they began picking mushrooms for a living, to consider broad-scale questions about ecological devastation and forest renewal, to how matsutake enter capitalist markets and informal gift economies in Japan.